| Sample-a-delic disc delivers delightful dizziness over drums. Oldies vocals meet weary robots in an electrical storm. Daedelus first came to my attention, as well as many others', after the release of the experimental collaboration with emcees Busdriver and Radioinactive. That album, simply entitled The Weather, can easily be regarded as a major head trip or a headache. The way one perceives it is based on that listener's background. Before checking it out one should ask him/herself, "Have I opened myself up to the abstractest rhymeslingers out there? Am I ready to be bombarded with cadenced phrases of cryptic word mazes? Do I really want to pay attention with all my might to what these crazy people have to say?" If your answer is no to one or all of these questions then perhaps you should skip the beats and rhymes experiment and direct your ears straight to the beat remix outing that is a result of producer Daedelus' revisiting of the album. Without the emcees adding that extra wall of sound that steals the spotlight from the production, listeners will have an enjoyable time letting the many layers of music sink in. On this rethink he takes his beats and samples and makes them the stars and focus of each dense production. Some of those samples were my favorite parts from the collaboration record anyway. For instance, on "Chorus, Verse, Chorus" the male vocal that sings, "Partly cloudy with an increased chance of rain" sounds like it was pulled from some forgotten LP by Beatles contemporaries. And he adds another line or two from that song into this one. There is also that robotic vocal on "Greatly Exaggerated, Our Demise" which just kills me: "For those of us who learned to slide by on the minimum / Giving up the answers but won't discuss curriculum." Who knows what the whole thing says? It doesn't matter because it's flawless. The speed of this album varies from track to track and within each track. But throughout its duration it continues to propel forward. Due to its plethora of killer seamless samples, one might dub it a new Paul's Boutique, but that would deny the fact that it was born after the rise of IDM. You see, it's not a straight instrumental hip-hop CD, it also has musical cousins in the Avalanches camp. However, whereas the Avalanches get booties shaking inside a nightclub, this album is more likely to get heads nodding in some unknown cartoon universe. Leave it up to the Mush label to release rare albums like this that easily cross the hip-hop/electronic divide and blend other genres into the mix at the same time. This is the album that will make heads take notice of Daedelus in a major way. It is too difficult to give a track by track description of this album, and I would rather not point out all the greatest spots. The music presented on Rethinking the Weather is such a mish-mash of unrelated samples joining together for new lives on an unbelievably exciting full-length that it is better for most of them to remain a surprise to be revealed on the first listen and every subsequent one. Because once you hear this disc you'll replay it over and over again. - Canned |
1XLP/Out Of Print